Yesterday at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., President Barack Obama led the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington celebrations with a speech that commemorated the March on Washington in 1963.
At the ?Let Freedom Ring? ceremony, the president reflected on Dr. Martin Luther King?s vision for racial equality and historic “I Have a Dream” speech; and the tenacity of the thousands of people who marched across Washington to demonstrate that vision. Below is an excerpt of the president’s speech:
Five decades ago today, Americans came to this honored place to lay claim to a promise made at our founding.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
In 1963, almost 200 years after those words were set to paper, a full century after a great war was fought and emancipation proclaimed, that promise, those truths remained unmet. And so they came by the thousands, from every corner of our country — men and women, young and old, blacks who longed for freedom and whites who could no longer accept freedom for themselves while witnessing the subjugation of others. Across the land, congregations sent them off with food and with prayer. In the middle of the night, entire blocks of Harlem came out to wish them well.
With the few dollars they scrimped from their labor, some bought tickets and boarded buses, even if they couldn’t always sit where they wanted to sit. Those with less money hitchhiked, or walked. They were seamstresses, and steelworkers, and students, and teachers, maids and pullman porters. They shared simple meals and bunked together on floors.
And then, on a hot summer day, they assembled here, in our nation’s capital, under the shadow of the great emancipator, to offer testimony of injustice, to petition their government for redress and to awaken America’s long-slumbering conscience.
Click here to read the full transcript of President Obama?s speech.
